A friend who teaches middle school English once said everything we teach about writing is wrong. We tell students to start each paragraph with a topic sentence and avoid sentence fragments at all costs. Then we introduce them to literature that opens with a hook and uses fragments to great effect.

While some “rules” are just plain wrong, others need to be learned before they’re broken. They bring clarity and focus. Not only scientific writing and business correspondence but even poetry strays from them only for a purpose. Strong writers may break the rules to convey a mood, set a tone, engage the reader – not to assert an excuse for incoherent rambling.

Something similar happens with rules of behavior and social interaction. No rulebook can cover every situation. We start by learning rules to show courtesy and respect. As we grow up, we learn to make judgment calls. I recall struggling over how far to participate in morning ceremonies as an American child at a Canadian summer camp, or in worship services of a faith that wasn’t mine. Those questions have no one right answer. Thoughtful adults may break a rule for a considered purpose, not as an excuse for rudeness.

The younger readers among you may have no memory of poliomyelitis. Older folks may remember avoiding swimming pools and movie theaters for fear of infection, or standing in lines in school yards to be vaccinated. Painter Frida Kahlo, actress Mia Farrow, and violinist Itzhak Perlman all had polio as children. This highly infectious, paralytic, sometimes fatal disease can be prevented by vaccination but can’t be treated or cured.

I was on the staff of Rotary International in the 1980s when Rotary joined with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to eradicate polio. Thirty years later, the partnership also includes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and the global incidence of polio is down more than 99.9%. Wiping poliovirus from the face of the earth, like smallpox before it, is the only way to keep polio from surging back.

​World Polio Day events around the world will raise awareness tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct. 24. The main celebration, at BMGF headquarters in Seattle, will be livestreamed. Click hereto watch at 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time or view a recording afterward.

I finally watched the first four episodes of Outlander last week on a family visit. What fun! Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels continue a tradition of fascination with Scotland that goes back 200 years. It first flourished in the Romantic era, with its love for unfamiliar worlds, high emotions, and the supernatural – the same era that gave us the gothic novel.

In the late 1700s, Scottish poet James Macpherson published a cycle of epic poems he claimed to have translated from an ancient Gaelic bard, Ossian. Ossian became an international best seller. Admirers included Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, and historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. Scotland was all the rage.

“The Highlanders were mythic, in the public imagination,” University of Michigan Professor Beth Genne told me. “The Scots became romantic figures instead of ‘those peasants’.” Adventuresome travelers toured the scarcely populated Highlands, home of what they considered the true Scots. Mendelssohn composed Fingal’s Cave and the Scottish Symphony after such a visit. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert chose the Highlands for the royal family's holiday home, Balmoral Castle.

In the 1954 movie Brigadoon, a Scottish Highland village rises out of the mist for one day every hundred years. Tommy, who happens on the village and falls in love with Fiona, must decide whether to stay with her or return to the twentieth century. Claire in Outlander faces a similar choice, in a more intricate plot with more attention to historical detail. Both are part of the long, rich tradition of romance in mythic Scotland.

Leif Erikson Day (Oct. 9), on the anniversary of the arrival in New York Harbor of the first organized shipload of immigrants from Norway, began in Wisconsin almost ninety years ago to celebrate Nordic heritage. But it’s the Italian-born explorer Christopher Columbus in whose controversial name banks and post offices are closed today. What are we celebrating, exactly?

Columbus Day was never chiefly about conquest and white supremacy. Protestant Americans of English and German ancestry, the dominant culture in the 1800s, paid little attention to Christopher Columbus. Immigrant minority communities – Roman Catholics and particularly Italians – created celebrations named for Columbus to affirm their place in a society that despised them.

Anti-immigrant groups rejected Columbus Day for its association with Catholicism. As Italian immigration peaked in the years around 1900, so did stereotypes of Italians: shifty, criminal, permanently foreign, fit only for manual labor, racially midway between white and Chinese. Violence mounted. Eleven Sicilians were lynched in a single incident in New Orleans in 1891. Ku Klux Klan activity targeted Italian Americans in New Jersey in the 1920s.

Lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, led to the establishment of a national Columbus Day holiday in 1937. Eighty years later, its associations with persecuted immigrants largely forgotten, should we rename it Indigenous Peoples Day? We might do better to let it fade into oblivion alongside Leif Erikson Day. In its place, we could create two holidays on unrelated dates: one named for an American Indian hero or event to honor indigenous peoples, and one to honor all immigrants regardless of faith or national origin.

Everyone has bias. Journalistic objectivity is easy to confuse with offering personal views in a neutral tone of voice, or giving equal time/space to each side of an issue. Flat earth and round earth, five minutes each.

According to the American Press Institute, the late-19th-century ideal of “realism” held that truth would emerge when reporters presented the facts. But honest intentions can’t erase personal bias. During the Russian Revolution, journalist Walter Lippmann said reporters saw what they wanted to see. True objectivity lies not in the person but the method.

Former Washington Post correspondent Paul Taylor said he used to write the lead before he began work on a story, then compare it to the lead after he finished. If they were too similar, he hadn’t looked far enough beyond his preconceptions. He had more work to do.